Review by UnhinderedbyTalent for Lard - The Last Temptation of Reid (1990)

The repetitive structures that occupy the world of extreme metal (or just some non-extreme metal in fact as well) are often as much of a curse as they are a gift in my experience. On the one hand you have the punishing riff patterns of say funeral doom that layer an instant level of emotional torture at the door of the listener and subject them to a looped burden for several minutes at a time. At the opposite end of the spectrum are albums like The Last Temptation of Reid, that get lumped into the Industrial genre (quite unnecessarily) down to their seemingly endless regurgitation of punk riffs and spoken word vocals.

God this is juvenile! I mean if there is one thing that Jello Biafra should not have done in his career it is contribute anything to Lard. His Dead Kennedys legacy is all but made a mockery of here; stabbing riffs and tappy drums make for a punky urgency to proceedings but this is a piss poor attempt to try and revisit former glories on behalf Biafra. There is no entertainment value for me to Lard. Unlike The Dead Kennedys, there is nothing contentious here to make the immaturity rational or even fun to that end. It plays like a lazy (and nowhere near as talented) Jane’s Addiction record only somehow made worse by endless spoken word lyrics and predictable structures – yes there is a difference between repetition and predictability folks.

My overarching experience when listening to this album is that I just want it to stop and leave me alone. It is by far one of the most alienating albums I think I have ever heard and as such is memorable to me for all the wrong reasons. It cements for me the ever-growing notion that Al Jourgensen is one of the most over-rated artists in the history of metal. With Barker and Ward here to add more Ministry credentials to the Lard sound it all just underlines why I find Ministry so dull and uninspiring nowadays. Add to this the mindless song structures and terrible vocals and this makes for one painful listen.